DUSSELDORF.- Maximiliane Baumgartner’s solo exhibition Proxy – Der Bürger als Pflanze comprises three interconnected chapters. The starting point for the show is the artist’s longstanding interest in spatial contexts and their social, political, and historical implications in light of structural continuities from the Nazi era. By focusing on specific examples, Baumgartner examines how Nazi structures are dealt with, revealing the extent to which urban planning and architecture continue to carry ideological and propagandistic remnants long after 1945, whilst practices of resistance were given little or no space.

The exhibition’s first chapter presents works stemming from Baumgartner’s engagement with the historic “Hof-Atelier Elvira” in Munich. The second chapter comprises works relating to the painter Dore Meyer-Vax, who was active in the city of Nuremberg during the postwar period. Produced in 2021 and 2024, both series of works foreground queer-feminist practices that resisted the propagandistic spatial and image politics of the Nazi era, and aimed at occupying public space. The third chapter focuses on Düsseldorf’s Nordpark, created in 1937 in the course of the “Große Reichsausstellung Schaffendes Volk” propaganda exhibition. The construction of the park was preceded by the violent eviction of the Heinefeld settlement, as a result of which many of the settlement’s residents, particularly Roma and Sinti, were deported and murdered. To this day, however, the park provides visitors with little critical commentary or broader contextualization regarding its history. Baumgartner’s newly produced works particularly focus on the city’s attempts at “democratizing” the Nordpark after 1945, questioning how this public space and its history were dealt with and how they are treated today.

The exhibition title, Proxy, is an English term referring to someone or something that acts on behalf of others or mediates between two parties, thus raising questions of agency, responsibility, and representation. Plants positioned throughout the exhibition space act as stand-ins for the public, reflecting on active and passive forms of seeing. How do spaces designed for ideological purposes, as “spaces of experience,” affect how we see? And how do plants shape how we apprehend these “right-wing spaces”? The relationship between people and plants is underlined by the exhibition’s subtitle, Der Bürger als Pflanze (The citizen as plant). “Der Bürger” (literally: a single male citizen) here refers to the extremely authoritarian and patriarchal structures of National Socialism and their continuing influence, while also standing for citizens as a whole. Then as now, people and plants played an equal role in reproducing the narrative of “innocence” and establishing the Nordpark as a recreational space rather than a critical site of memory and learning.

The exhibition is supported by the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung, the Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Düsseldorf, the Kunst- und Kulturstiftung der Stadtsparkasse Düsseldorf, and Galerie Max Mayer, Berlin.

Maximiliane Baumgartner was invited by Kathrin Bentele.
The exhibition is curated by Clara Maria Blasius.